Word of the Day: Tech Definitions from WhatIs.com

An enterprising group of criminals has been using a real-world scam in an effort to spread malware. The attacks reportedly began with a series of phony parking tickets issued in Grand Rapids, North Dakota. Individuals had the tickets placed under their windshields along with instructions to visit a website.

Ping is probably the simplest TCP/IP diagnostic utility ever created, but the information that it can provide you with is invaluable. Simply put, ping tells you whether or not your workstation can communicate with another machine.

Could it be that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has finally found a way to monetize social networking? If you believe Richard Wray, it just might be a GENIUS way to monetize the site. That is, if members don’t cry “Privacy!” like they did with the site’s last attempt to make some money, Beacon.

The magic word is…polls.

Now mind you, polling at Facebook is nothing new. What’s new is the perfect storm that surrounds Facebook — the site’s expanding demographics, demonstrated audience engagement — and a tanking economy where marketers have less money to throw at more traditional focus groups.

This might be exactly the right time for Facebook to push out self-service polls and make them them the basis for monetizing the site, much as Google figured out how to monetize search back in October of 2000 with self-service AdSense ads.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves when bogger Brian Ussery stumbled across a wee bit of code hidden away in a Google Pack software bundle for Windows users, which appeared to contain GDrive’s product category and description.

Atlanta blogger Brian Ussery spotted a reference to the mythical GDrive last week — and started a blogswarm. The description said:

GoogleGDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents. GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime, and from any device – be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone.

I think the only interesting thing, when we finally get confirmation that indeed — the GDrive is ready and available — will be how much free storage Google grants you. Microsoft started out with five but now gives you 25 GB for free with SkyDrive. If Google tops that, THEN I’ll be impressed.

Nielsen said it measured the preparedness for the upcoming transition to all-digital broadcasting and how many households would be unable to receive any television programming at all if the transition occurred on Jan. 22, the day of the survey’s posting.

It said 4.0 percent of Americans 55 and older were unready for the transition, while 8.8 percent of Americans 35 and younger were not prepared.

According to Nielsen, a total of 6.5 Americans (5.7 percent) aren’t ready for the switch to digital television, which is scheduled for Feb. 17.

For the life of me, I don’t understand why our Senate voted to delay the switch to digital TV.

Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets. Wikimedia and Mozilla want to help to build a web where video and audio are first class citizens: easy to use and manipulate by anyone, without compulsory royalty schemes or other barriers to participation.

Mozilla and Wikimedia share a strong commitment to open standards. Version 3.1 of the Mozilla Firefox web browser will include built-in support to play audio and video in the open source Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora formats. All audio and video in Wikipedia is stored in these formats.

This is interesting. Mozilla gave $100,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation to “help coordinate improvements to the development of Ogg Theora and related open video technologies.” That’s not a lot of money, but it’s generating a lot of buzz because it’s a step towards open video standards. Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla) does a nice job explaining how a better Ogg would potentially open up the market for streaming video and knock both Adobe (Flash) and Microsoft (Silverlight) off their proprietary thrones.

Ogg isn’t a file format — it’s a container format. What’s that? Well, when you order something from Amazon, it’s put in a box and the UPS guy delivers the box to your house. On the Web, when you order a streaming video, think of Ogg as the virtual box that’s used to deliver the video to your computer. Wikipedia has a handy chart that compares container formats.

Celeb Choreographer Ashley Wallen took the dancers through an intensive 80 hour rehearsal to ensure they nailed the performance as they could only film a single take. Commuters stand and watch in amazement as the routine gets going and many can be seen taking pictures on their phones still unaware of what is happening around them.

People encountering Ubuntu for the first time will find it very similar to Windows. The operating system has a slick graphical interface, familiar menus and all the common desktop software: a Web browser, an e-mail program, instant-messaging software and a free suite of programs for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

There’s a big blogswarm right now about about whether or not Ubuntu is easy to use.

It all started when a college student in Madison Wisconsin bought a Dell laptop for a distance learning class and the computer arrived with Unbuntu Linux as the operating system. She was not a happy customer because she wanted Windows — so she went to the local TV station to get some help. The story got picked up by Digg and by Slashdot and Linux bloggers everywhere and the poor girl was bombarded with hate comments.

I’m just not getting it.

Is this an Ubuntu story? Or is it a dissatisfied customer story? It’s certainly NOT a story about how girls are stupid idiots and should not be allowed near a laptop running Linux. But that’s what you might think from reading some of the trash floating around the blogosphere.

Sure, Ubuntu might look like Windows — but hey guys, does it work exactly like Windows? That is, can you really expect the average college kid who’s grown up using Windows to open a laptop running Ubuntu without a hitch? Apparently someone at Dell tech support thought so. That is until he started getting blaimstormed in the media for ending this Wisconsin student’s college career.

The whole thing is kind of silly. It’s not the girl’s fault, it’s not the tech support guy’s fault and it has nothing to do with Ubuntu.

You’d have the same problem if you asked a Windows’ user who’s never used a Mac to start work tomorrow using OS X . There are going to be some moments of confusion and getting lost. It would be silly to presume otherwise. Yeah, the basics are still the same, but things are put in different places and tools are called by different names. It’s just OS culture shock. You have a panic attack and you get over it. That’s all that happened to that poor girl in Wisconsin.

Aha! Now THAT’S an interesting story. You see, Mark Shuttleworth — who describes himself as a billionaire, bachelor and ex-cosmonaut — has teamed up with Dell to make Ubuntu the operating system of choice for low-end laptops. And he’s not doing it for the money. He’s doing it because he likes the challenge. (And what’s more challenging than selling something the customer can get for free?)

His company’s name is Canonical. According to New York Times it’s worth $30 million right now. Keep an eye out for Mark Shuttleworth. Like Bill Gates, he’s an intriguing mix of businessman-humanitarian. Mark Shuttleworth is going to be a very interesting personality to follow as the world’s economy recovers from the Crash of ’08.

Data center managers are starting to recognize that 70 percent to 90 percent of their data is not transactional in nature, but rather, persistent data that is rarely changed, and infrequently accessed…The key to managing persistent data is to deploy storage systems that are tuned specifically to its needs. One technology that is ideally suited for persistent data is MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) storage.

Tonight I’ve been reading about MAID and how it can help cut energy costs in the data center by limiting the number of spinning disks. This week’s buzzword (besides Obama) seems to have been “intelligent power management.”

Ironically, according to a CDW Corp. report titled “Energy Efficient Information Technology,” 94 percent of IT executives with purchasing responsibility said they cared about energy efficiency but had no idea how much energy their IT operations used — even though they realized that that knowledge is critical to energy reduction efforts. CDW should have sent them all this list of low-hanging-fruit energy savers from SearchSMBStorage.com

Security vendors from across the spectrum have warned that a stingy worm has been successfully exploiting a hole in Microsoft Windows server service. Known as Confliker or Downadup, the worm spreads by exploiting a remote procedure call (RPC) vulnerability.

The worm, which some authorities say has been able to build the largest botnet on record, works by exploiting a vulnerability in remote procedure calls that allows remote code to be executed once a vulnerable machine receives a specially crafted RPC request. In plain English, this means that if an end user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer, his computer will request malicious code to be executed. Like many of its malicious predecessors, this worm denies infected machines Internet access to security vendor websites.

Microsoft added routines to clean up Conficker infections to the January edition of its Malicious Software Removal Tool. Customers in the U.S. and Canada can receive technical support from Microsoft Product Support Services at 1-866-PCSAFETY. There is no charge for support calls that are associated with security updates. The National Cyber Alert System recommends that to prevent further infections by infected USB devices, users should disable the Windows auto-play feature.

About This Blog

The WhatIs.com Word of the Day archive is like an impressionist painting about information technology. Close up, the focus seems to be on random tech terms. Take a step back and look at all the posts together — and you begin to see a clear picture of how enterprise IT is evolving.